Leaked document suggests DfE planning teacher pay rises and crackdown on behaviour
According to the Guardian newspaper, the government may make significant increases to education funding.
Proposals include:
• Increasing teachers’ basic pay to £30k by 2020
• Encouraging school leaders to confiscate or ban mobile phones
• Backing headteachers to exclude pupils and supporting heads who use ‘reasonable force’ to improve discipline
• Offering academy trusts £24k incentives to take over struggling schools
• Opening a new wave of free schools, excluding alternative provision schools for excluded children
• Removing exemptions from regular inspection for schools rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted
• A fresh push to convert local authority maintained schools to academy status.
It’s not yet known if £800 million of extra money for sixth form and FE colleges will be made available. According to the report, discussions about this are ‘still under discussion with the Treasury’.
Government removes its holiday calculator
BEIS had an excellent online calculator that worked out how much holiday workers must receive. It did a lot of the hard work, and was particularly useful to determine the holiday entitlement of workers who start or leave part way through a leave year.
That calculator has been removed, and we don’t know whether it will be reinstated once changes are made to reflect the Brazel decision.
Home Office announces end of freedom of movement
The Home Office has announced freedom of movement is to end on the first day of a no-deal Brexit, overturning the previous government’s plans.
The finer details of this new system aren’t yet known. So far, the Home Office have simply said that ‘improvements to the previous government’s plans for a new immigration system are being developed and the government will set out its plans shortly’.
The announcement affects anyone looking to come after 31 October 2019 to the UK for longer periods of time, be that for extended travel, working or studying in the UK.
Influential report calls on government to ‘fundamentally change’ the way discrimination claims are enforced
The House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee has published a report which, if implemented, will radically change the way in which individuals who experience discrimination can enforce their rights.
The Committee believes that many organisations don’t worry about breaching the Equality Act and, in some cases, behave with ‘impunity’ because it is left to individuals to bring claims and most don't.
It calls for a fundamental change to the way in which equality is thought about and enforced, so that individuals ‘rarely’ need to bring their own cases.
It recommends:
1. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) must ‘up their game’ and help to make compliance the ‘norm’. Specifically, it should use the enforcement powers it already has to drive change by intervening more often, and then publishing information about these cases to act as a deterrent to other organisations.
2. Indemnifying the EHRC against having to pay the other sides costs if it loses strategically important cases.
3. Putting a mandatory duty on employers to protect workers from unlawful harassment and victimisation in the workplace enforceable by the EHRC, and imposing substantial financial penalties on organisations that breach this.
4. Requiring public sector employers to conduct risk assessments to identify unlawful harassment and to put in place plans to mitigate those risks.
5. Requiring the EHRC to prioritise taking action against public authorities in England, Scotland and Wales that fail to implement their public sector equality duty.
6. Identifying a small number of examples of inequality or discrimination within the public sector and introducing new specific duties to tackle these.
7. Imposing a legal duty on each government department to ensure that the public sector enforcement bodies they are responsible for (including regulators, inspectorates and ombudsmen) use their powers to comply with the Equality Act.
It remains to be seen whether the government will implement these suggestions.
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